Executive Board

Martin Visbeck holds the physical oceanography chair at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and is professor at Kiel University, Germany. Martin’s current research is concerned with ocean and climate variability and change with particular emphasis on the circulation of the Subpolar North Atlantic. Martin has been serving on several advisory committees.

Currently, he is the co-chair of the World Climate Research Project CLIVAR, a member of the German National Committee for Global Change Research, the German Committee Future Earth, and is Speaker of the Kiel Cluster of Excellence ‘The Future Ocean’, which is advancing integrated marine sciences.

Martin is a member of the leadership council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network – a global initiative for the United Nations that mobilizes scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable development problem solving at local, national, and global scales.

Albert Fischer is Head of the Ocean Observations and Services Section of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, serving as the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) Office Director. He has a Ph.D. in physical oceanography from the MIT / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, where he focused on observations of air-sea interaction, and worked as a researcher at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) focused on modeling coupled climate variability. He has been with GOOS and based at IOC/UNESCO since 2004. He helped organize the OceanObs’09 conference, and worked with the team that subsequently developed the Framework for Ocean Observing. He is a U.S. and Swiss national, is half Korean, and is fluent in English and French.

Pierre-Yves Le Traon is a physical oceanographer. He holds of PhD and an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Toulouse University. He is the scientific director of Mercator Ocean and research director at Ifremer. He is in charge of the scientific direction of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS). His research interests include satellite, in-situ observing systems and operational oceanography. P.Y. Le Traon is/was the coordinator several French and European projects related to operational oceanography and Argo. He is member of GOOS, EOOS (European Ocean Observing System) and GEO Blue Planet Steering Committees. He is a past member of the ESA Earth Science Advisory Committee and the EuroGOOS board. He was co-chair of the International GODAE Steering Team and is now member of the GODAE OceanView (OceanPredict) Patrons group. Pierre-Yves Le Traon has authored/co-authored more than 110 publications in international peer-reviewed literature. In 2012, he received the European Geophysical Union Fridtjof Nansen medal.

Dr. Kate Larkin is Deputy Executive Secretary of the European Marine Board (EMB), Europe’s foremost marine science policy think-tank, delivering strategy and foresight to advance European research focused on seas and oceans. She has a multidisciplinary background, gaining a degree in Natural Sciences (University of Birmingham, UK) before training as a marine biogeochemist at the University of Southampton (PhD, 2006). She continued her scientific research at the National Oceanography Centre, UK with research interests including benthic carbon cycling and ocean time-series. She later held scientific and project management roles for National and European ocean observation projects including the NE Atlantic Porcupine Abyssal Plain Observatory, the FP6 EUR-OCEANS Network of Excellence (WP2.1 Observing Systems) and the FP7 EuroSITES European open ocean observatory network. This included involvement in international ocean observation initiatives, such as OceanSITES and as a member of the OceanObs’09 Programme Committee.

As Deputy Head of the EMB Secretariat, Kate provides management support on all aspects of the EMB work programme, including management of Secretariat staff. She also coordinates a range of scientific activities spanning marine graduate training to deep-sea research. In 2012-2014 Kate played a key role in the European FP7 Coordination and Support Action STAGES, delivering a Proposal for a Science-Policy Interface to support implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). This included extensive stakeholder identification, planning and consultation on mechanisms to improve the uptake of scientific knowledge into ocean governance and decision making.

However Kate’s core focus and expertise at EMB remains marine research infrastructures and ocean observation systems. In 2013 she was lead author for the EMB Navigating the Future IV chapter 11 ‘An integrated and sustained European Ocean Observing System (EOOS)’. Kate remains active in this area, working with other networks, e.g. EuroGOOS towards a common framework for European ocean observation, bridging the gap between the marine scientific and operational oceanographic communities.

In AtlantOS, Kate is co-lead for WP10 Engagement, Dissemination and Communication. She also leads Task 10.6 to deliver a strategic foresight paper on the contribution of AtlantOS towards a EOOS.

Sabrina Speich is currently Professor of Ocean, Atmosphere and Climate Sciences of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris (France) where she is also the Dean of Studies of the Department of Geosciences. She is member of the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL).

She gained her Master degree in Physics at the University of Trieste in Italy and came to France in 1990 as a Ph D student at University Paris VI – Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université). Her Ph. D work was completed in 1992 under the supervision of Dr. Michel Crépon and involved using ocean numerical simulations to understand key features of the Mediterranean Sea circulation. In 1992-4 she completed a UCAR postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Los Angeles with Prof. Michael Ghil before returning to France, this time to stay.

Sabrina’ research interests concern the uncovering and understanding of ocean dynamics and air-sea interactions and they role on climate variability, on climate change and related impacts. She is an internationally recognized expert in ocean modeling as well as in organizing wide programs of in situ observations. She is recently focusing her research on scale-interactions in atmosphere-ocean dynamics, and how they affect the Earth climate and marine ecosystems under global warming.

In particular, the ocean being the sub-climate system changing the most under the anthropogenic action, she is deeply involved in augmenting and improving the efficiency of a fit-for-purpose integrated ocean observing system and this together with a continuous scientific effort to understand ocean and air-sea exchanges processes. To reach such goals, Sabrina engaged in the international effort by co-chairing the Clivar Atlantic Regional Panel and by participating to the work of others international committees (SCAR, OOPC).